Sunday, 23 September 2012

They’re constantly cited
as a priceless first rung on the employment ladder in an economy with few jobs
and one of the few, true saving graces that could stall and evenreverse the
escalating youth unemploymentsituation
in Britain.

Modern apprenticeship
schemes have made a dramatic comeback in the last few years. Since 2006 the
number of apprentices more than doubled, reaching 453,000 by the end of
2011. They’re the government’s palliative to a programme that hinges, in a seemingly
oppositional way, on cutbacks instead of investment for growth.

That the coalition is
advocating apprenticeships at a time when redundancy rates are high and the
ratio of job applications to available jobs is in some casesover 50 to
onecould seem an
attempt to tackle unemployment especially amongst young people, of whom the
number now classed as not in employment, education or training (NEETS) has
skyrocketed in the last year.

Apprenticeships have
obvious benefits both to applicants and wider society. They provide the
opportunity to learn a trade and develop skills that in theory should be a
stepping stone to a stable, mapped out future career and ensure that countries
retain a substantial amount of industrial experts and that knowledge of key
skills are not lost.

The government believes
that many apprenticeships lead to better chances of secure employment upon
completion. On the Apprenticeship website they also state that on average
apprentices earn around £170 a week, well above the minimum rate of £97.50 for
37.5 hours of work.

Yet there are growing
concerns about the way some apprenticeships are operating in the UK, in the
context of a recession-ridden economy. Some have suggested that motives for
companies to hire apprentices in reality sometimes fit less with the idealised
images. Instead of recreating the celebrated old-style German apprenticeships
and implying that employers understand the need to adequately equip future
generations with the knowledge to continue to provide key skills to society
apprenticeships could serve a more self interested cost-cutting and
profit-saving intent.

The elephant in the room
is the government’s current dismantling of the welfare system, whose focus on
“workfare” is part of an enormous scheme to radically cut government spending.
By pushing the growth of apprenticeships the coalition pays less in JSA and a
reduced amount to apprentice employers in grants and learning fee costs,
thereby serving their aim of spending cuts quite well. On top of this is
the problem of how to ensure that apprenticeships equal secure employment at a
time when industries are cutting back and shedding jobs. In this way, could
apprenticeships be a sop thrown to make us think something is being done to
tackle unemployment when in reality it is just masking the problem?

Michael, 16, from
Liverpool, is currently employed at a large charity shop through the retail
apprenticeship scheme which he enrolled on in July this year. He is concerned
about the pay, his conditions at work alongside the value of his apprenticeship
and is considering leaving the course due to financial worries that have
worsened for himself and his family since starting as an apprentice.

“I work 37.5 hours a week
for £100 a week with around 20 other staff, most of who are on some sort of
work placement or volunteers. My auntie, who I live with, has lost around £70 a
week in benefits due to me going on this apprenticeship because I’m now classed
as being in full-time employment. The council has done things like deduct £3
per week from her housing benefit which I’ve been told I must now pay. I don’t
get any separate travel expenses so I’ve also got to pay for the two hours
travel per day out of my wages. By me going on this apprenticeship we’re worse
off than when I was in college so I’m considering leaving the scheme and going
back into education. People who are on an apprenticeship should be paid minimum
wage because they are working for and benefitting the company. £2.60 per hour
is pure slave labour.”

Michael’s concern over low
pay is not alone. Searches on social media sites such as Twitter reveal pages
of criticism over having to work for up to 50 hours a week on pay drastically below
minimum wage. Adam Fisher, 18, wants to start an apprenticeship as he believes
that in the long run the qualifications and training will be beneficial to him
but is reluctant to leave his current job due to doubts over whether he can
afford the large drop in income.

“Getting paid £2.60 per
hour isridiculous. Skills training and practical
experience could help me start a better career but I don’t know how I willsurvive off£97 a week for doing 40 hoursat the moment” , he said.

My cousin took an
apprenticeship in gardening in 2006, earning the then minimum £80 per week. Yet
after he qualified he continued to be paid the same rate even though he was
legally entitled to at least minimum wage, arguably more considering he’d
undertaken a two years skilled training course. Six years on, long after he
completed his initial training and specialised in one area as well as now
occasionally taking charge of the day-to-day jobs when his boss is away his pay
is well below what it should be, to the extent that he is still sometimes not
even being paid minimum wage.

Michael is not just
worried about his pay. He thinks that after he has completed his 12 month
apprenticeship the company won’t keep him on as a full time staff member.

“It’s been suggested to me
that I won’t be kept on after I’ve qualified because they don’t have it in
their budget. So basically the low pay now isn’t really justified because the
company, like other apprentice employers, has no obligation to offer jobs even
if apprentices successfully complete the course. I think I’ll find it
hard to find a job after the year with just this apprenticeship qualification
because competition for jobs is so tough in Liverpool. I think they’ve
started taking on apprentices because we’re cheap labour. There hasn’t been
much talk of creating actual jobs for people off the back of this.”

Losing your job to make
way for another apprentice seems common practice in certain workplaces. Michael
spoke of a friend who had undertaken an apprenticeship in hospitality and
catering at a restaurant, only to be told there were no jobs for him after he
successfully completed the course despite continuing to hire apprentices.

In some cases companies
have even been reported to have gone so far as sacking staff members to replace
them with the cheaper rate apprentices. In Manchester, Tom (not his real name)
was employed full time as an estate agent until his boss told him that he was
closing the business to move away. It was only when his dad drove past the same
estate agents a few weeks later he had been made redundant to find not only
that the shop was still open but that the team had been replaced with
apprentices. Lacking sufficient former staff members, the potential for the
apprentices to benefit from the scheme was also doubtful.

Earlier this year theGuardianreported that despite the haemorrhage
of jobs from British manufacturing and engineering firms such as BAE Systems
and Bombardier apprenticeship figures in the same industry had risen by 25%.
One explanation could be that companies are safeguarding profits in the short
term by taking on apprentices over already qualified members, instead of taking
on both, a strategy that could be short-sighted for the company and risks
dividing apprentices and existing employees.

It’s not just in these
ways that some apprenticeships have come under fire. The core component of
apprenticeships is adequate training to ensure that apprentices come away from
their placement with adequate training and skills to do a specific job well.
Employers, with financial help from thegovernmentshould
have an adequate training programmes in place for apprentices. However in some
instances this has led to situation in which training providers, instead
of focusing on the highest quality content,undercut each other to provide the
cheapest service possible to employers to secure contracts. Without
substantial monitoring by the government to make sure this doesn't happen this
means that apprentices can sometimes come away without adequate training to
work their way up in their chosen field. In Michael’s case he believes that the
training in his apprenticeship has been inadequate.

“The training I’ve been
given has been pretty minimal; they trained me up to work on the shop
floor then stopped and college has said that they will just send me a work pack
out to complete at home to obtain my NVQ in retail and functional skills. I
applied to be a retail assistant; working on tills and focusing on customer
service but the manager is using me to do all the odd jobs that no one else
really wants to do, like cleaning the toilets and washing up used cutlery in
the staffroom.

“There are good
apprenticeships out there but I don’t think mine is one of them. If I had the
opportunity to move around different shops, work in the head office or even in
the fundraising department I’d have a much more rounded experience and a lot
more opportunities to specialise and progress in retail. It seems like the
managers haven’t bothered to create an adequate learning programme for the
apprentices which makes me question their motives behind offering
apprenticeships. I don’t think they took me on for the right reasons.

“The apprenticeship could
help me quite a lot in terms of getting an entry level job because it proves
that I have some experience but I’m missing a lot of the skills I’d have liked
to have gained to work my way up in retail. I think after a few weeks of
working at the shop I’d gained all the worthwhile experience it seems I’m going
to ever get whilst working there so now I just feel like I’m being kept on as
cheap labour. I don’t think that the qualifications themselves are that
important in themselves either, it looks like they just added the paper
qualification on to make it sound more official.”

Even Justin King, CEO of
Sainsbury’s parent company (J Sainsbury PLC), has commented on the ambiguous
makeup of some schemes doled out as “apprenticeships” to potential applicants.

He said:“I believe the word apprentice has
become hijacked. A lot of things masquerade as apprenticeships which are not
what you and I would recognise as an apprenticeship – learning a skill over an
extended period of time.”

Apprenticeships can be an
invaluable platform into a skilled career, if they offer the right sort of
training and prospects. Yet in some instances in Britain the term acts as
little more than a cover for government-endorsed cheap labour that struggles to
ensure secure employment for all those who successfully complete the courses or
even substantial training. The existence of unscrupulous, self-interested
apprentice employers suggests that the government is not actively ensuring that
apprenticeships are offered for the right reasons.

Apprenticeships
should be equipping people with adequate practical experience and knowledge to
become future experts in their fields. They should also be financially
practical, which the £2.60 rate is not, especially to those with existing jobs
and who have people who are dependent on their income. To make someone choose
between practical skills development and continuing their existing job with
which pays enough to make ends meet denies many people the opportunity to
become specialists in a certain role.

They should not be a tool
to reduce companies’ overheads, threaten existing employees jobs and offer
false hope of secure, long term employment to apprentices. They should also not
act as cut price JSA which could keep people in a continuous apprenticeship cyclein a society bereft of jobs or as an
indicator that the government is doing something to tackle the UK’s
unemployment problem. Without investment to create long-term jobs and develop
industries apprenticeships can’t resolve this issue. What they are doing is
hiding the reality of joblessness, particularly the real levels of youth
unemployment in the UK.

Saturday, 15 September 2012

Manchester’s unemployment rate is at its highest in 12 years.
84,600 people are now claiming JSA in the city, almost 30% of whom have been
unemployed for more than 6 months. For young people, those without jobs have
spiralled in number since 2000, with almost 900% more 18-24 year olds now jobless
and not in education or training.

Yet unemployment is only part of a bleak picture that has been
etched onto our contemporary landscape. Talk of the all too real possibility of
a privatised health service, the accelerated marketisation of education and the
obliteration of welfare support is now so widespread that they have become national
clichés.

It’s also an almost grotesque, parody-type situation where ATOS,
the company driving life-changing cuts to disabled people’s benefits are seen,
if only by a small yet powerful few, as a responsible sponsor of the
Paralympics.

For increasing numbers of people in Manchester and across the
UK, the ability to fight back en mass against regressive attacks on their lives
is complicated by the fact that they exist outside secure employment. Employment
brings with it the opportunity for union organisation and all the resulting
benefits such as easy channels of communication and organisation, even if this
sort of organisation is facing more difficulties of its own today.

At a time when more people are vulnerable due to existing
outside the scope of this form of organisation, whether they are unemployed,
students or retired, the emergence of another sort of union in Manchester is
even more relevant than ever.

Unite’s community union scheme, launched earlier this year, brings
people outside workplaces together and offers a concrete platform on which to
organise and access support services. Encouraging groups to become established
around the country , Unite have in a way reignited interest in the idea of
community unions that dates back (on a major level) in England at least to the
1930s. This was when the National
Unemployed Workers’ Movement formed amidst mass unemployment and poverty to
improve the conditions of the jobless galvanising the support of hundreds of thousands
at its marches.

Although created by Unite, this sort of union is different in
that it operates on a more grass roots level, allowing people who may feel
pushed to the margins of society to come together and find a strong political
voice of their own. For 50p per week the community unions give members the
chance to come together to form strong communities which take a stand and push
for co-ordinated, bottom-up action to create a better and fairer situation.

They also offer support services such as legal advice, cv and
letter application writing, interview tips, debt counselling, welfare benefits
check up and hardship grants.

Manchester is one of the cities with its own branches of the
community unions, Since being created in June the Manchester and Salford branch
now includes subgroups in Salford, North, South and East Manchester.

Tom Barlow, one of the organisers, thinks that Unite’s community
unions are especially important in our current time of recession and
reactionary political policies.

“community unions have always been a relevant idea but im glad
that a major union is now fully behind them on such a large scale basis. These
unions are comprised of some of the most vulnerable people in society who are
without a stable workplace and thus the potential for organised representation
that comes with that. With growing unemployment these people need this
representation now more than ever.

“We’ve got a lot of people in our groups who were active in
unions whilst in work but have lost their jobs. Lots of people who were
formerly employed who just can’t get work at the moment. The response we’ve had
so far is positive. The union isn’t allied to any specific political project
which I think helps it to have a lot broader membership base that’s made up of a
more diverse set of people who despite whatever differences they may have in
some ways all believe that action needs to be taken to stop what is happening at
the moment in Britain.

“We know there is a lot to campaign about but we also understand we need to be focused so that we have a better chance
of achieving change. At the moment we are concentrating on building around the
ATOS campaign, the healthcare company whose work assessment is threatening the lives of those with
disabilities. Recent national studies have claimed that numerous people have
committed suicide as a result of ATOS's decision made about their
benefits and suitability for work. At the moment we
are concentrating on ATOS's attacks on those who receive disability allowance. The cuts are absolutely devastating people’s
lives. We hope to start focusing on fuel poverty, council tax and housing
benefit cuts as well as focusing on the TUC demo on the 20th October.

“Community unions allow the unemployed, elderly and students to
focus on issues at a local level then build out and link with other branches
and unions around the country so that we have and feed into a strong web of
support that can’t easily be picked apart, for example, by governmental
policies, like what happened in the 1980s.”

The Greater Manchester Unite Community Union will be holding a
public meeting on 18th September at Friends Meeting House. More
details can be found hereand
via Unite.

Thursday, 13 September 2012

A short article that I wrote for the Lancashire Evening Post (proper posts will be going up this weekend!):

Youth unemployment in Preston has risen 800% in the last year, according to figures released this week.

The ONS data released on 12th September revealed that the number of young Prestonians in between the age of 16-24 not in employment, education or training (NEETS) has rocketed by 120 people in between August 2011 and 2012, from 15 to 135.

The statistics also highlighted a continued rise in general unemployment to almost eight per cent, a figure that has climbed five per cent in the last five years.

Mark Hendrick, Labour and Cooperative MP for Preston, perturbed by the figures

He said: “The dramatic increase in NEETS is terrible, these figures are far too high. Young people need work to get valuable practical job experience. Without these opportunities they can't embark upon a secure career path, which could seriously affect their prospects in the future.

“These figures highlight that employment rates and economic growth will not be achieved under the current government's policies. “